1.2 Release

After however months it’s been since our last release, Tarski 1.2 is finally here. Here’s the changelog, which gives details on the various fixes, tweaks and new features.

Since most people won’t want to trudge through the changelog, here’s a brief list of some of the major things we’ve added, many of them after user requests.

There are now links to next and previous entries in individual archive pages, so people can navigate from entry to entry. There’s also pagination support for posts and pages, so you can make multiple-page posts and pages.

Also included is the pagination of index pages (like category and date archives, the front page, and so on). This is completely optional: you can enable or disable it at will from the Tarski Options page.

There’s some under-the-hood stuff, like better trackback and language support (so that people can do translations: more on this later). We’ve also added more theme hooks, and done default styling for a number of additional HTML elements.

Styling & Markup

Two things in this release: firstly, we’ve added insert classes (see the contents listing on the Docs & Help page for an example) to let you add things like updates and menus without having to write your own CSS. I’ll probably write up a brief tutorial some time in the next few days.

Secondly, and more majorly, Tarski’s positioning markup has been substantially rewritten. This will most likely break some people’s custom styles, which is why I hesitated so long over making the changes, but I’m convinced that they will not only make it easier for people to write custom styles but that it will also make working with those styles a much more enjoyable experience.

The new code is more streamlined, more global, and better laid-out. I hope you’ll take advantage of the many improvements in 1.2, break your old styles, and rewrite them under the new system.

Experienced CSS coders will be able to evaluate the changes just by looking at the code, but here’s the executive summary, culled from the roadmap‘s notes on this change:

CSS Rewrite Notes

The plan is to replace the numerous, purpose-written classes and ids with a simpler, standardised system. The two basic building-blocks currently being worked on include a content class—for areas like blog entries, text widgets, the ‘about’ text, and so on—and a couple of positioning classes, probably primary and secondary, for the creation of floated columns.

A fairly thorough pruning and re-organisation of the main style.css file will probably be carried out at the same time. New documentation may be added to help people writing alternate styles to easily manipulate our styling system.

We were going to wait, so we could include translations in this version, but we decided just to get 1.2 out there and release new versions as and when translations arrive. You can download the from our localisation page.

Please post translation submissions on the forum, it makes it a lot easier for us if support and modification stuff goes through there. Alternatively, if you’re feeling shy, you could email me with your work.

In Closing

Many, many thanks to our beta testers and the various problems they reported. Tarski 1.2 is undoubtedly a more polished release due to their hard work.

That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen; we hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.

As always, post any bugs (and there will be some, despite the devoted efforts of our testers) on the forum.

I couldn’t find that string anywhere in Tarski, what’s the context is which you’re coming across it?

By the way, we did look into the Intypo issue and we’re fairly sure we’ve found the underlying cause, but not a solution (yet). Essentially Intypo replaces the English typography in the bits of text that go through WP‘s filters: post content, extracts generated from post content (not put in by the user), titles, and so on. Nothing else seems to get caught, whether it’s run through wptexturize() or just generated by _e().

Perhaps the typography issue is something to be targeted in the WP core rather than by a mere plugin. Oh well, Western culture doesn’t depend on it.

This “more” thing appears where the <!–more–> tag has been inserted. In Tarski 1.1.3 and any other theme there is usually something like “Read on” given as clear text. That can be easily replaced by a localised wording. I did so with Taski 1.2 again, but to my astonishment “(more…)” appears instead of “Weiterlesen” or “Read the rest of this entry”. It seem to be coming out of the blue.

Hi there – I have just installed v1.2 and wondered if I could ask a quick question – probably really easy for someone there to solve but as an amateur I don’t have a clue!

On the navigation links that now appear above a single post, I’d really like to be able to right justify the one that takes you on to the next post (and leave the one for the previous post left justified), and get rid of the little blog in between! How would I go about doing this?

It’s a bit complicated—I did actually consider doing it that way, but the way I ended up going with is a lot simpler and degrades more nicely under stress (bumped-up text sizes, long titles, big disparities in title length).

If you post your request on the forum (I’ll forget about it otherwise), I’ll have a go at talking you through it.

Just to let anyone else who might be interested know, I posted a guide on how to do this.

A few issues.
When I changed over, the Site Admin link is part of the Navigation Bar. I want to get rid of that and just go to Site Admin directly. I can’t find an option to turn it off, nor the spot in the code that puts it there.
For some reason, I can’t get the constants to work with sidebar. I put it in li tags just in case it needed it, but no luck.
Finally, I can’t seem to edit widgets, such as text blocks… I click it and nothing happens.
I just came off using Canvas and back to the regular Tarski with the new update.

I have moved this site to a new server. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to finish migrating content and debugging everything, but I think a website with a few things missing that’s actually available is much better than one that has all the content but keeps crashing every couple of days. The major […]

Sorry about the recent downtime, the server the site lives on keeps running out of memory. I’m hoping to move it to a newer, better-provisioned one soon but I haven’t had the time to complete the process. In the meantime, thanks to the people who’ve let me know when it’s gone down. I’ll try to […]